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“I think," she said, "I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love." . . . "What do you think the story is about now?" . . . "Sometimes I think it's a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn't accidental, him confiding in me, just then." Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it's I want you to think that I trust you with this.”

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“It might be worth mentioning that at that moment I hated Laura, was glad her marriage had fallen apart, that her ceaseless trust in the world had at last been proven foolish. Finding friends in every city she moved to, marrying a man on the strength of what, who knows, everywhere manufacturing happiness, happiness, happiness. But her luck had run out. Her story was still the better story, but finally, thank god, she was miserable in it.”

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“Of course there's a reason this fantasy belongs to childhood. Starting over is difficult and painful and the past isn't dead and buried it isn't even, etc. And the fact is that starting over becomes more so—difficult and painful I mean—the older one gets, for the older one gets the more numerous the ties to life one wishes to leave behind, the more ties therefore to cut. The more ties therefore, later, if one is possessed of what is sometimes called a weak ego and what is sometimes called a conscience, to mend. What I mean is I'd waited too long.”

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“In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that's what narrative's for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it's harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you've grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn't do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.”

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“Am I, just now, more interested in appearing openly louche (look at me lapping at luxury) or secretly wounded? How close to the surface is my pain? Or, rather, how close to the surface do I want my pain to appear to be? How enamored am I of the clichés of female pain? Or, rather, of which of these clichés am I enamored? Do I wish to make my distress visible and, therefore, hysterical? Or do I wish to suffer in silence?”

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“I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times its barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret.”

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“This was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation.”

Topics Of ConversationMiranda Popkey
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